MARIAN is a surviving example of what once were the aristocracy of working sail, the Bristol Channel pilot cutters. At the height of the British empire, the industrial ports of the Bristol Channel—Bristol, Cardiff (Marian's home port) and Newport—were among the world’s busiest. The Bristol Channel is also one of the most difficult bodies of water to navigate, with astoundingly rough seas in winter, the world’s second most powerful tides, and innumerable mud banks and rocky shores. The 150 or so pilots of the Bristol Channel, as a body, were no doubt the world’s finest—to get qualified took half a lifetime—and so too were their vessels.

The work of a Bristol pilot was handsome when you got it, but the competition was fierce. Cutters out “seeking”—looking for an incoming steamer on which to land a pilot—would race far out into the Atlantic to be the most “western” boat, and therefore the first to place a pilot on board. Each time any self-respecting pilot was rowed across to the waiting steamer, he donned, no matter the weather or distance from land, his shoregoing rig of suit, fob-watch and bow-tie.

Marian

In the end, the ascendancy of steam and the economic dislocations of the first world war together dealt a death blow to the sailing cutters. Overnight, dozens of cutters were thrown out of commission and onto the mud to rot, or into the arms of canny yachtsmen. Steam-driven pilot boats were introduced, and open competition was replaced by a pilot’s roster, a cheaper proposition for the shipping companies that paid the pilots’ dues.

Years later a sheet of paper was found among the belongings of one Welsh pilot, Simon Bartlett. He had begun to draw up the arguments against the new pilotage service. “I shall lose my freedom,” was all he managed to write.

Marian is the antithesis of the modern yacht. She was built, to no yacht-racing rule, in 1889—three years before the invention of the diesel engine (though she has one now!). She is made of 2"-thick pine planks fastened to English oak frames. There is no carbon fibre even glue in her build. Her mast is made of Douglas fir, while her rigging is sturdy galvanised wire.  And  though she is 50 feet long less her bowsprit  weighs about 30 tons, she has not a single winch on board, apart from for the anchor. All the hoisting and hauling of sails is done with block-and-tackle--that is, rope purchases.

The story of the Bristol Channel pilot cutters might well stir an unreconstructed sailor from the Joshua Slocum school of nostalgia; yet there is more than nostalgia to the tale. For these boats were thrown onto the scrap heap at the peak of their evolutionary development. Pilot cutters boast a winning combination of speed, seaworthiness and seakindliness.

Old boats are different from old motor cars. Old cars may stir the blood, but they are beasts to handle and hideously expensive to maintain; nobody suggests using a 1926 Bentley as a runabout. Old boats, on the other hand, are kinder to sail, by far, than modern boats, and still make extraordinary voyages. Bristol Channel pilot cutters, in the past few decades, have roamed up to Greenland and down around Cape Horn, sometimes (as with the late sailor-mountaineer Bill Tilman) with owners of equal vintage. The pilots’ living depended upon these boats being fast. They had to be seaworthy, for they stayed out in the worst of seas and weather, all year round and for days on end. And they had to be seakindly, for these big boats were handled by just a man and boy, whether racing out into the Atlantic or remaining “hove-to” on station. In short, they make wonderful vessels for sailors, young and old, of the 21st century.